California

I love California. As an outdoorsy person, how can you possibly beat mountains and beaches? Well, you can't. My lack of blogging (and picture taking) this past week meant one thing -- I was having a great time.

I left Santa Monica 1 year, 6 months and 7 days ago. The one thing people kept saying is, "I can't believe it's been that long." It has truly felt like five or six months. While in LA I got to catch up with nearly all my friends, while also experiencing LA the way one always should -- with bike rides, hikes, swims and plenty of beach time.

Here's a little photo montage of my ten days out west...

Can I Take Your Temperature?

Two friends of mine (names withheld in case the Chinese government reads my blog) were hired to work at an English summer camp in China. They arrived in Shanghai the other day and were greeted by this:

Chinese health inspectors came on to their flight wearing HAZMAT-ish suits and took everyone's temperature to check for swine flu. What you can't see is the "thermometer." I was told by my friend that the thermometers were shaped like guns and that they were placed on their foreheads. Nothing like having a gun held up to your head by men in HAZMAT suits after a 10+ hour flight.

Reverse Culture Shock #8

Spending time in Los Angeles this week has me realizing the difference in air quality between America and Vietnam. Brace yourself for this: Los Angeles' air is exponentially cleaner than Hanoi's air. Yup, I said it. America's most famous smog city has waaaaaaaaaaaaaay cleaner air than Hanoi.

I love Vietnam (and Asia in general) but the country needs to do something about the air pollution ASAP.

McNamara

(CNN) -- Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a key architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, has died at age 93, according to his family.

Robert McNamara took a lead role in managing the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam.

McNamara was a member of Kennedy's inner circle during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war.

But he became a public lightning rod for his management of the war in Vietnam, overseeing the U.S. military commitment there as it grew from fewer than 1,000 advisers to more than half a million troops.

Though the increasingly unpopular conflict was sometimes dubbed "McNamara's War," he later said both administrations were "terribly wrong" to have pursued military action beyond 1963.

"External military force cannot reconstruct a failed state, and Vietnam, during much of that period, was a failed state politically," he told CNN in a 1996 interview for the "Cold War" documentary series. "We didn't recognize it as such."

A native of San Francisco, McNamara studied economics at the University of California and earned a master's degree in business from Harvard. He was a staff officer in the Army Air Corps during World War II, when he studied the results of American bombing raids on Germany and Japan in search of ways to improve their accuracy and efficiency.

After the war, he joined the Ford Motor Company and became its president in November 1960 -- the first person to lead the company from outside its founding family. A month later, the newly elected Kennedy asked him to become secretary of defense, making him one of the "whiz kids" who joined the young president's administration.

In October 1962, after the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, McNamara was one of Kennedy's top advisers in the standoff that followed. The United States imposed a naval "quarantine" on Cuba, a Soviet ally, and prepared for possible airstrikes or an invasion. The Soviets withdrew the missiles in exchange for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba, a step that allowed Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev to present the pullback as a success to his own people.

In the 2003 documentary "The Fog of War," McNamara told filmmaker Errol Morris that the experience taught American policymakers to "put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes." But he added, "In the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war."

McNamara is credited with using the management techniques he mastered as a corporate executive to streamline the Pentagon, computerizing and smoothing out much of the U.S. military's vast purchasing and personnel system. And in Vietnam, he attempted to use those techniques to measure the progress of the war.

Metrics such as use of "body counts" and scientific solutions such as using the herbicide Agent Orange to defoliate jungles in which communist guerrillas hid became trademarks of the conflict. McNamara made several trips to South Vietnam to study the situation firsthand.

He, Johnson and other U.S. officials portrayed the war as a necessary battle in the Cold War, a proxy struggle to prevent communism from taking control of all of Southeast Asia. But while they saw the conflict as another front in the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, which backed communist North Vietnam, McNamara acknowledged later that they underestimated Vietnamese nationalism and opposition to the U.S.-backed government in Saigon.

"The conflict within South Vietnam itself had all of the characteristics of a civil war, and we didn't look upon it as largely a civil war, and we weren't measuring our progress as one would have in what was largely a civil war," he told CNN.

Casualties mounted, as did domestic opposition to the war. In 1965, a Quaker anti-war protester, Norman Morrison, set himself on fire outside McNamara's office window. In 1967, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched on the Pentagon, which was ringed with troops.

By November 1967, McNamara told Johnson that there was "no reasonable way" to end the war quickly, and that the United States needed to reduce its forces in Vietnam and turn the fighting over to the American-backed government in Saigon. By the end of that month, Johnson announced he was replacing McNamara at the Pentagon and moving him to the World Bank. But by March 1968, Johnson had reached virtually the same conclusion as McNamara. He issued a call for peace talks and announced he would not seek re-election.

After leaving the Pentagon in early 1968, McNamara spent 12 years leading the World Bank. He said little publicly about Vietnam until the publication of a 1995 memoir, "In Retrospect."

"You don't know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear," he told Morris. "A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I'm a son of a bitch."

Independence Day

Something occurred to me last night when Huyen wished me a happy fourth of July. The last time I celebrated an "Independence Day" it was in Vietnam, where they were celebrating -- more or less -- independence from us (and the French). Everyone needs someone to be independent from. Happy 4th of July!

Fourteen Months

Fourteen months ago I met Huyen. I still smile every time I think of her...especially when she sends me funny pictures of her hanging out in trees:

Reverse Culture Shock #7

I'm 201 lbs. Yup, it's true. I've officially cracked the 200 lb* threshold. I'm pretty sure that I've gained about five or six pounds since I've come home. I attribute this to a few things:

1. I'm not working out. To join a gym in the USA you need to pay a membership fee and then monthly fees on top of it. Since I'm home for just three months it isn't worth it. I've tried running by I've got chronically bad knees.

2. Food portions in America are bigger than in Vietnam. As you can imagine, the average American is a tad bigger than the average Vietnamese person and thus the portions are a tad bigger too. I use the word "tad" very loosely here.

3. I'm eating less fruits and vegetables. Sure there is no shortage of fruits and veggies here but in Vietnam they just seemed more attractive. There's something more enticing about seeing a woman selling pineapples just plucked from the ground than a bowl of peaches sitting on my kitchen counter top for a few days.

The weight gain is probably not going to stop anytime soon. Today I'm flying to LA where I will gorge myself on my favorite eats that I haven't enjoyed in a year and a half. That said, I'm also packing my speedo to start swimming again or else I'm going to finally look like the adult version of what I looked like when I was a baby:

(PICTURE: I'm the one with the double chin.)











*I once was 205 lbs a few years ago so total panic has not set in.